


The Other Road

by DWEmma



Category: Jewish Legend & Lore, Rent - Larson
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2018-03-11 14:50:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3330059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DWEmma/pseuds/DWEmma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark Cohen has been hired to shoot video of a forest to advocate for saving it as a preserve. But upon getting lost, he stumbles upon a shack with chicken legs...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [natapa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/natapa/gifts).



Step by step, he wandered through the trees, holding his camera on his shoulder. He wished his camera was less heavy. He wished he’d worn the right shoes. But mostly, he wished he knew where he was and how to get back to the train. 

He ad been hired by a nonprofit organization to take his camera through some of the abandoned wilderness in upper Westchester County. Some developers wanted to buy the land, but the nonprofit wanted to make it into a protected park, so they needed evidence of natural beauty and wildlife. It wasn’t fine art, but maybe he could get some shots that he could use in one of his person projects as well. And they were paying him money to do good in the world. Life could be worse. Plus, as much as he hated to admit it, he felt a certain amount of affection toward Westchester. 

And he’d gotten some great shots: an endangered owl asleep inside of a tree knot, gorgeous rock formations, and a sparkling stream. He had enough to cut together to create basically a tourism video of the forest, enough to convince anyone to turn it into a preserve and not into a subdivision. 

But Mark had never really been a wilderness person. And his innate sense of direction that he had in Manhattan was based on streets and avenues, rather than an understanding of magnetic north. Or, looking at his compass, which was currently spinning in a circle, what to do when north ceased to exist according to your instruments. 

So he was trying to remember something he had learned as a kid about moss on trees only growing on some side (was it north?) when he saw the house. Perhaps house wasn’t the best name for it. It was a shack, maybe a hunter’s shack, oddly perched on two long sticks with bases made of three other sticks. They looked like bird legs, and didn’t look like they could hold up the house in a very stable way. There also seemed to be a fence around the area, made of some sort of bleached out stick that looked like bones to Mark, though he knew that was impossible. 

He turned his camera back on and got some great shots of the creepy site. It looked abandoned, so he wasn’t perhaps as cautious as he might have been if he’d thought anyone could see him. He was so far into the middle of the forest that no one could possibly live there. So he took his camera to the windows on the back of the house, the part facing him, and tried to get some images of what was inside. The windows were set in a way that made them feel like eyes. It was like taking the eye of his camera and looking into the eyes of someone else. He was pretty sure that Rodger had a song that would work really well with these shots as a music video. He knew that non-profit wouldn’t want them. 

He looked into the windows and he saw an old cookstove, a simple bed, and a birdcage. There was no dust on anything, so he supposed that someone did live there. At that realization, he backed up, and decided that even though the person who lived there could help him find the way out of the forest, he probably shouldn’t get caught filming in their home without permission. He turned off the camera, and wondered if he should shout out the forest around him to see if he could find the owner. He walked around the front of the shack, and the weirdest thing happened. The house bent down on the sticks (legs?) and opened the front door to him. Mark was furious that his camera wasn’t on, especially since he was partly convinced that he was going completely insane, and he would like proof that this either did or did not actually happen. 

But he walked in the door. He had no idea why, but the door compelled him to. And after he did, the house stood back up on its legs, and the door closed after him. 

He woke up the next morning in the little bed, with a terrifying old woman standing over him. She, like her house, looked a bit like a chicken, her long spindly legs under her skirt making her look like a chicken, like a dinosaur, and her face looking happily angry, in a way. 

“Get up,” she said. 

He got up. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t usually break into strangers houses without invitations, but your house opened the door to me and I was lost and I live in the city, and I had been walking all day, and -“

“Sit,” she said, motioning to a chair.

He sat down. 

“Did you come here with a pure heart, willingly, or did someone force you to come?” she asked. 

Mark thought about that for a second. He was hired to come out here. But no one forced him. He thought about why he took the job, which certainly wasn’t for the tiny sum of money he was getting for the time this would take him, He thought about the boy scouts trips to the camping site, not that far from here, and that feeling of being connected to the roots of art that he doesn’t get in the same way in Alphabet City. He’s connected in some ways, but not the ways he was looking for. 

“I came here willingly,” he said to her, knowing that he was telling the truth. “I’m here to collect visual evidence that this forest should be preserved, rather than torn down. I’m here to save the forest. Someone hired me, but not for so much money that any sane person would have been out here unless they wanted to help. I’m here to help.” 

She nodded at him. “Go now,” she said. And he didn’t ask for directions. And when he left, he heard a great scream as the house spun away. And in it’s wake, he found the edge of the forest. He walked his way back to the train station, grabbing a sandwich as he went, and rode his way home. 

The footage of the house was gone.


End file.
